“The population explosion, threatened nuclear destruction, emergent nations, racial turmoil, moral and theological revolution—all these cry out for the living Christ.”
One of the great evangelical outbursts of modern times—and one from which the church today may learn much—began in 1886, when the Student Volunteer Movement came into being at Mount Hermon, Massachusetts. Three years before, Robert P. Wilder, a student at Princeton University, had organized a small group of friends who had declared their willingness to become missionaries, and daily Wilder and his sister had prayed for a thousand volunteers for the foreign field.
Their watchword, which originated in an expression used by Wilder’s father, was “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation.” Adopted by the new movement and used as the title of a book by John R. Mott (who along with Robert E. Speer was early associated with Wilder), the words became one of the great slogans in Christian history. They voiced a heroic challenge as thousands of the finest young men and women from leading colleges and universities volunteered for missionary service.
The movement spread rapidly. Before 1920 more than 5,000 young people from American colleges alone had gone out as foreign missionaries through the Student Volunteer Movement. A similar ferment had been working in England, particularly through the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, out of which years later the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and its American counterpart, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, came.
The response to the watchword, “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” was essentially transdenominational. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the word “ecumenical” had not yet come into the prominence it now enjoys. But the Student Volunteer Movement and much of the service rendered by its products was ecumenical in that Christians of various traditions were united in common loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ and worked together to make his Gospel known. Theirs was an ecumenism without a compelling urge for merger of churches. Something of its spirit was exemplified by the China Inland Mission, which attracted many student volunteers and in which Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others followed their own church traditions while united in a common effort. (Today this practical ecumenism continues in the Overseas Missionary Fellowship—successor to the China Inland Mission—and is also carried out in many countries by evangelical workers representing missions affiliated with the EFMA and the IFMA as well as with the denominations.) But the development of ecumenism as a distinct movement somehow failed to perpetuate the vision of evangelizing the world in a single generation; the torch was somehow dropped, the evangel compromised in some quarters, and evangelism at home and abroad neglected.
By the 1930s, the influence of the Student Volunteer Movement had begun to wane. Perhaps the rise of modernism and, later, the radical displacement and disillusionment brought about by the Second World War contributed to its decline. Today many take it for granted that the heroic challenge of Christian missions no longer appeals to youth and that such agencies as the Peace Corps have superseded the challenge of the global proclamation of Christ. The falsity of this is demonstrated by the great student missionary conferences held at the University of Illinois under the auspices of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and also by the many young men and young women who are giving themselves to the cause of world evangelism. Yet even here there are dismaying signs. While denominational boards have long faced a shortage of mission candidates, now independent missions are beginning to experience a decrease of prospective workers. And so, at a time of the world’s desperate need for Christ, fewer are willing to give up everything to make him known.
Thus the question arises, “Shall we revive the slogan?” Shall we revive it not just as a form of words but as a valid, realizable, and compelling goal not only for students but for every committed Christian?
Before considering an answer, it would be well to think about what the slogan means. Those who used it so effectively did not expect every human being in their generation to become a Christian. They were not advocating superficial witness, nor did they undervalue long-range work such as educational and medical missions. “ ‘What is meant,’ said Wilder, ‘is simply this: the presenting of the Gospel in such a manner to every soul in this world that the responsibility for what is done with it shall no longer rest upon the Christian church, or any individual Christian, but shall rest on each man’s head for himself’.… By ‘this generation’ the early volunteers meant their own lifetime” (A Cambridge Movement, by J. C. Pollock, p. 133).
If in the 1880s and in the early 1900s it was timely to speak of “The Evangelization of the World in This Generation,” how much more timely it is today. The population explosion, threatened nuclear destruction, emergent nations, racial turmoil, moral and theological revolution—all these cry out for the living Christ. Logically the question about reviving the slogan rests upon two subsidiary questions: (1) Is the slogan still relevant? (2) Is it possible to achieve?
By no means every churchman will answer the first question affirmatively. Advocates of the new morality and “the death of God,” those who are committed to the secular society or who elevate social reform to gospel status instead of insisting upon it as the essential outcome of the Gospel, will consider the renewal of the call to evangelize the world in this generation supremely irrelevant. Nevertheless, the challenge will not down. For Christians who are committed to the historic faith of the Bible, for those who know that trust in Jesus Christ makes all the difference in this world and in the world to come—and there are many all over the earth—the slogan can still be a mighty summons to action. In the scale of Christian values, a need constitutes a call. In Christian obedience the word of the Master is binding. Nothing has happened in this space age to alter in the slightest the command of Jesus Christ to preach the Gospel to the whole world.
But what about the realization of the slogan? Is it not quixotic to think that the globe with its 3.3 billion human beings multiplying at about 2 per cent a year (65 million at present) can be evangelized within this generation? Moreover, the growth of the church during recent decades has been terribly slow. At the turn of the century Christians were estimated at 35 per cent of the world’s population; now, six decades later, the proportion has fallen to about 30 per cent. If the rate of decline continues, by the year 2000, Christians will be 20 per cent of mankind. And yet—the slogan is realizable.
It is realizable because of the kind of age this is and because of the kind of commission Christians have. For the first time in human history, the majority of mankind can now be reached almost instantly, and no part of the earth is more than forty-eight hours in travel time from any other part. Modern means of communication and travel make the evangelization of the world in a single generation more possible now than ever before.
Consider the kind of commission we Christians have. Jesus Christ never promised his followers that the whole world would be converted through their efforts. But he ordered them to take his message to the whole world and to do it in the power of the Spirit. Unless universalism is assumed, it must be granted that some who hear the Gospel will be lost. Our commission is to preach and teach the Gospel but none can be forced into discipleship. Worldwide proclamation, yes, and this through Christ’s worldwide body made up of men of every tribe and nation who are in Jesus Christ through faith—this is the realizable objective. But it is realizable only through a radical rethinking of the whole enterprise of evangelism.
The greatest single factor inhibiting the evangelization of the world is the narrow concept of Christian witness that pervades practically all churches. The basic reason why Christianity is being outdistanced by the population is that most church members consider evangelism the business of professionals rather than the responsibility of every believer. The World Congress on Evangelism can do no less than urge Christians to take, as did John Wesley in his day, the whole world for their parish. What is needed is for the whole Church to begin witnessing—at home, abroad, everywhere.
No greater hindrance to the evangelization of the world in this generation exists than to limit the responsibility for it to men like Billy Graham and others to whom God has given special talents for reaching the multitudes, or to confine witness to Christ’s saving truth to the ordained. The idea that evangelism is chiefly to be done in churches and public meetings is a deadly inhibitor of the worldwide outreach of the Christian message. The Church must use new techniques, ranging from neighbors’ drinking coffee together, through special inner-city witness, electronic communication, and literacy programs, to penetration of the world of art and intellect on the one hand and of industry on the other hand. Not only at home where it is confronted by the indifference of secularism but also abroad where it is faced with the implacable opposition of Islam, the smothering syncretism of Buddhism, or the fierce challenge of Communism, the Church must break away from crippling dependence upon the ordained and the professionals to make the Gospel known.
Shall we revive the slogan? If the answer is a resolute affirmative, it must be an affirmative spoken with deep humility and in honest recognition of the cost. Humanly speaking, it seems impossible for Christians to manifest sufficient unanimity of witnessing power to evangelize the world in a generation. But let it not be forgotten that in the early centuries, to a degree since unparalleled, every Christian was a missionary. The call is not just to the nominal church member but to the minority of regenerate Christians all over the world who, minority though they be, yet comprise a powerful multitude for God. It is they who, energized by the Holy Spirit, must break the chains of custom that have bound so many to silence and join in making Jesus Christ known in this their own time.
Yes, the evangelization of the world in this generation is possible. There may not be another generation. A biblical eschatology holds out the possibility (not the certainty) that this generation may be the last, and destructive forces at large in the world underline the urgency of these days. But whether or not the consummation is at hand, Christ holds us responsible to be his witnesses “to the very ends of the earth.” Let the slogan be revived; let the task be done.
